Tag Archives: climate

This is really interesting. NASA released this rare photograph of Alaska from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite on June 17, 2013. Most of the time the state is covered with clouds, but not on that … Continue reading →

I published on March 4, 2013, a new commentary on the policy issues surrounding what to do about asteroid/meteor/comet impacts. Chicken Little Was Right just appeared on the National Air and Space Museum’s blog. It notes that yes, indeed, the … Continue reading →

I have been working on a study of the Clementine program, a lunar orbiter that flew in 1994. Here is the abstract for this study. I would welcome any thoughts about it. In the early 1990s, just as the Cold … Continue reading →

From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean, 1492-1969. By Eric Williams. New York: Vintage Books, 1970. I visited the Caribbean for the first time in the fall of 2011, and this sparked me to want to learn more … Continue reading →

Do You Know Me? That was the unforgettable phrase that opened a series of classic American Express commercials from the 1970s. In them, people with well-known names but whose faces were not so memorable pitched how that charge card gave … Continue reading →

Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys. By Michael Collins. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974. (40th Anniversary Edition, June 23, 2009) There have been several excellent Apollo astronaut memoirs, especially Gene Cernan’s The Last Man on the Moon and … Continue reading →

You knew it had to happen! She mission controllers from JPL that landed the Curiosity rover so successfully on Mars on August 6, inspired a great rap video now gone viral. Based on the popular LMFAO song, “Sexy and I … Continue reading →

On June 15, 2012, I moderated a briefing on the history of spaceflight and its relationship to current public policy issues. The National History Center xponsored this event and has placed information about it on-line. Check out the discussion and … Continue reading →

Representing the international character of many NASA planetary missions since Voyager, Cassini-Huygens, a joint effort of NASA, the European Space Agency, and Italian Space Agency, has also proved to be an incredible success. It seems appropriate to recall this mission … Continue reading →

The Age of American Unreason. By Susan Jacoby. New York: Pantheon Books, 2008. While there is much on this book that is quite valuable and I certainly recommend reading it, Susan Jacoby reminds me of so many ancient Roman writers … Continue reading →